Clause 73 - Urgent investigative steps
Criminal Justice Bill
5:21 pm
Mr Dominic Grieve (Beaconsfield, Conservative)
I am grateful to those members of the Committee who decided that it was worth while to stay the course and enable us to conclude our proceedings. The clause provides a mechanism that enables an officer, without having to go the DPP for his authorisation, to take any action for the purposes of an investigation when each of a series of conditions is met. It states:
''The first condition is that the investigation is authorised by an officer of the rank of superintendent or above . . . Such an authorisation may be given before or after the start of the investigation . . . The second condition is that—(a) new evidence which would be relevant to an application . . . in respect of the qualifying offence to which the investigation relates is available or known to the officer authorising the investigation, or (b) that officer has reasonable grounds for believing that such new evidence is likely as a result of the investigation to become available or known to him
. . . The third condition is that the action is necessary as a matter of urgency—(a) to prevent the investigation being substantially and irrevocably prejudiced, or (b) to prevent death or serious personal injury.''
I found the clause rather difficult. I tried to think of circumstances in which it would be necessary for such steps to be taken in a reinvestigation in this fashion. After all, the whole nature of the reinvestigation and retrial process is that it is the revisiting of a previous case in which someone has been acquitted. It would hardly have the flavour of the police having to intervene as an emergency, because the crime to which it relates was committed prior to the first trial, yet here we are going one stage further than the DPP's administrative scrutiny.
We are saying that a police officer can take emergency action, which may involve interference with someone's liberty, in respect of an offence of which he has previously been acquitted, when, by its very nature, one would not expect the reinvestigation process to be an emergency process at all. It strongly suggests that there will be a preliminary investigation by the police before the DPP is asked to look into the matter. While I can understand that happening in respect of outsiders or areas that do not concern the defendant, I find it difficult to see why the defendant would have, or need to have, any contact with the police at that preliminary stage.
This is a fairly draconian step, and I cannot but think that a chief constable, not simply someone of the rank of superintendent, is the right person to give such authorisation. Otherwise, there is a serious danger that such interference could become routine. That is the key issue in both amendments, but there is another issue concerning death and serious personal injury, to which I shall return.
Will the Minister clarify in what circumstances the clause would be invoked and consider whether it might not be more sensible for a chief constable to give the authorisation, because the clause provides for the authorisation of actions that would otherwise be unlawful? If it is a matter of intervening to protect a witness who might be engaged at the retrial—not because he is being threatened by the acquitted defendant to prevent him from co-operating with the police—the clause is unnecessary, because the ordinary powers of the police to protect a citizen from the actions of another person would be quite sufficient.